How to define your Law Firm’s Buyer Persona

The first step in meeting this new digital engagement imperative is defining, and looking for concrete insight on your clients.

The key to understanding your client is to tease out the questions that matter to them: How do they think about your firm, and what’s important to them? Are they focused on a particular practice area, or do they care more about the reputation of the attorney? Is it your thought leadership or insight that resonates?

For each of these keys, you can then map out your client’s unique decision-making process to hire your firm, and then position information in front of your audience to answer their critical questions.

To do this, you want to develop concrete buyer personas based on your core target markets.

What is a Buyer Persona?

One of the best definitions of buyer personas comes from Tony Zambito, who writes:

“Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions. Today, I now include where they buy as well as when buyers decide to buy.”

Sample Buyer Persona

This doesn’t need to be over-complicated. Your buyer persona profile may look like this:

Name: Daniel Regan

Age: 49

Title: CEO

Digital Status: Savvy, likes gadgets, owns multiple devices (invests in Apple), used to run IT

Factors that Influence Decision-Making: Working with industry leaders, track record of excellence, price

To fill out this sample persona, you can look into your analytics for inputs. The details of your core persona development can come from a variety of places, including:

Users’ profiles and preferences: Everything they’ve told you about themselves by filling out a form or personal connections (if you already know them).

Clients’ history with you: You can use intelligence from what they’ve done on your site, how they have interacted with your online community, or how they have responded to your emails, etc.

How they found you: Even which search terms that delivered your prospects can offer insight into your critical personas, as can tagging each campaign URL to determine your visitor’s first entry points into your site.

Their immediate behaviors: Review what your visitors are doing in their current session (clickstreams, site searches, etc.) to gain insight.

You also want to determine where the a new prospect is reading up on you, whether you are looking at a past/inactive client or an client looking to do more with you, or potentially a partner or other industry expert (e.g. financial advisor) who is considering recommending you to one of their clients.